Which! reveals the best mince pies

Christmas ain’t Christmas without the dubious pleasures of mincemeat. So assuming you’re not making your own mincemeat from scratch with home grown fruit and organic suet, which shop- bought pies are best to shovel into your mouth while watching the Strictly Christmas special?

Who better to ask, of course, than Which!, who have very helpfully compiled a list of the best and worst. Top of the pops are from everybody’s favourite budget no-brand shop Aldi, whose luxury £1.69 mince pies predictably scored better than everyone else. And at the bottom of the list was…Fortnum and Mason, whose mince pies cost £12.95 and apparently taste like poo.

In second place were Lidl’s amusingly named Snowy Lodge mince pies, which fared well with the judges, who included baker Dan Lepard and artisan breadmaker Patrick Moore (who may or may not have a monocle).

But does this sort of result surprise us any more? Budget supermarkets are beating luxury brands so regularly that these blind taste tests are as tediously inevitable as kissing your Aunty Sheila under the miseltoe.

Is there any reason to shop anywhere else? Why don’t we just close down all the other supermarkets and have ‘I Heart Aldi’ tattooed across our bottoms?

Aldi and Lidl foods tend to have a lot less sugar and salt in them, so the testers (who tend to be very fussy eaters and usually make their own), notice the better flavour/sugar/salt ratio in their products.
The average Joe – raised on standard over-salted/sugared UK food would take a while to get used to the lower sugar/salt levels and notice the flavour improvements.

This is not just an Aldi/Lidl thing, most Euro countries use less sugar/salt. The Euro version of Tango Orange has 30% less sugar than the UK version and tastes really sour if you try it after drinking the UK version.

(I’m not sure if it is still true, but companies used to be PAID by the government to put UK sourced sugar into their products – so they added it to everything in the maximum quantities they could get away with – often adding more salt to hide the sweetness!!!